Joanne Freeman: The insults that started duels in Alexander Hamilton’s America

Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and the search for “Americanism”

Stephen Colbert’s two-minute Moby-Dick lesson is a real roller-coaster ride

Talented New York trio finds the music in Jack Kerouac’s poetry and prose

E. L. Doctorow pays tribute to Herman Melville’s great “kitchen-sink sort of book”

Watch: Sportswriter’s classic portrayal of Muhammad Ali, “the maddest of existentialists,” lives again in new video

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on “an implicit political victory for our people”

John Ashbery and Paul Auster at Brooklyn Book Festival; February House